alt Hacker News> surely you know how often it happens that developers of popular extensions are approached by shady businesses and sometimes do even sell.
Yes, developers of free extensions who sell for a pittance.
I don't have a popular extension. My extension is relatively expensive and thus unpopular. I don't have enough users to be interesting to shady businesses. My extension is more valuable to me than to anyone else, because I, one person, can make a living from it.
> As someone else has pointed out to you, not hypothetical.
That link seems a bit silly. There's a screenshot with no explanatory context whatsoever. There's a list of items, many of which look quite mundane and uninteresting. Certainly it is not suggesting acquiring the company for millions of dollars. It sounds like someone—could even be an intern for all we know—is interested in attacking the app from the outside.
I agree with tptacek: "This is clownish" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13813828
> You give yourself too little credit.
No, I give myself too much credit. ;-)
> I know of several developers and other people with influence who use your extensions with complete trust. Compromising you means compromising them, which means compromising even more people.
What is the value of compromising these people? Oh noes, the CIA can now write Daring Fireball articles!
> Jia Tan has aptly demonstrated you don’t need to directly attack your final target, only a link in the chain, even if it looks insignificant.
What chain? I have no third-party dependencies. If someone can compromise Apple's operating systems, then my software or Little Snitch is the least of our worries.
I do specifically and intentionally avoid using NPM, because of frequent compromises. Little Snitch is not even JavaScript, so no worries there.
> My extension is more valuable to me than to anyone else, because I, one person, can make a living from it.
I believe you, and as a fellow indie developer trust you and your intentions and that you’re careful to not be compromised. But if I’m being honest with myself I don’t have concrete proof of any of those. So I trust but also try to limit the blast radius if anything goes wrong. Does that make sense? I think you might agree there.
Your blog helps with that trust and with understanding the human behind it.
> Certainly it is not suggesting acquiring the company for millions of dollars.
Alright, yeah, I see we’re talking a bit past each other in that regard. You’re right that’s how the conversation started (before I joined in) but I don’t care for that angle fully either. I agree there are more plausible ways to achieve the objective.
> Oh noes, the CIA can now write Daring Fireball articles!
Not sure that’d be a downgrade. Maybe they could fix the Markdown perl script, too. Joking aside, I think there would be better targets, like someone on Apple’s Passwords team.
> What chain? I have no third-party dependencies. If someone can compromise Apple's operating systems
I don’t mean it in the sense of software dependencies, but in the sense that some app you use would compromise you. You know macOS’ permissions are mostly security theatre. We know people inside Apple use third-party apps. I can imagine ways of exploiting that, given a bit more knowledge of people from inside (which could be gathered from working there for a while, trawling social media, maybe reading Gruber’s emails, …).
> I do specifically and intentionally avoid using NPM, because of frequent compromises.
Same, no argument from me there.